Words have never been more prized, but the arrangement of those words are merely an afterthought. In the race to get content out as quickly as possible, little attention is paid to the quality of that content. And while this has long been true of anonymous websites hoping to score some quick page views from Google News, it is becoming common place for more established websites like Yahoo and The Washington Post.
Welcome to the Real-Time Web.
It's not just the arrangement of words that have become an afterthought. Typos have always existed, and as we transition to a publish first and edit second (if at all) mentality, typos are commonplace. But the race has become so frenzied even formatting has been thrown out the door.
How bad is it? I've noticed in recent months that Yahoo has struck a deal with The National Football Post to provide content in their NFL sports channel. It's a great website filled with industry insiders like ex-GMs, so I can forgive the not-so-great writing in order to get the expert opinion. I can even forgive the writer -- one of the few 'professional' writers on the site -- who seems unable to produce a paragraph containing more than a single sentence. What I can't seem to forgive are the photographs that break the formatting of the article on Yahoo's page, often causing the text to scroll into very thin columns.
Skip to the Washington Post that often gets a cheap page view from me as I scroll through Google News. Being a tech guy, I'm interested in tech stories, and the Washington Post reproduces columns from TechCrunch.com. These are the type of stories that catch my eye. Unfortunately, they frequently come out poorly formatted, often omitting the paragraphs that are found on the original site, thus forcing me to hunt for the article on TechCrunch's site rather than continuing to read it on the Washington Post.
Which leads me to wonder, if a newspaper with the pedigree of the Washington Post is so greedy for content that they are willing to strip the quality right out of it, is there any room for quality anywhere on the web?